What is the secret code to maintain a normal weight?

What determines who you are? Genes and the environment

What determines your weight? Genes and the environment

All our biological characteristics including height, eye color, and even some behaviors are genetically predetermined! Is it likely then that your weight is similarly genetically set? And therefore affects your weightloss diet?

The answer is YES…but the actual weight (height and behavior) you carry is the expression of those genes and most importantly your environment and lifestyle you lead. The high prevalence and persistence of obesity in spite of everyone’s efforts reflects the role of their genetic predisposition and environmental factors.

Weight Set Point





Through complex hormonal mechanism the body is set to maintain a given weight over a long period of time, until and unless a significant life event alters that. Some known events, including pregnancy, illness (including emotional trauma) and other upheavals of life, are known to trigger the alteration of weight-control mechanisms through hormonal and behavior mechanisms. Once the new weight is allowed to last sometime, it becomes a new normal for the individual and change is resisted by the body’s defenses.

Scientific studies have clearly shown how starvation, even for a brief period, induces hormones (insulin and leptin) that lead to increased feeding signals and the slowing of metabolism. And as soon as feeding resumes, insulin and other hormones work to restore the fat and weight loss!

It becomes easy to appreciate the fact that no single weight loss plan or tactic is known to achieve a permanent new lower weight probably because of the body’s natural hormonal and the central nervous systems which combine to restore the weight lost and negate the individual’s efforts.

This explains why most people who lose weight successfully end up regaining that weight. It is this tendency to revert back to original weight that gave rise to the “Weight Set Point” theory. Simply stated, Weight Set Point means that whatever weight is lost will be regained so as to restore the body’s weight to a previously set point, at which point the body appears to work harmoniously – this is its “comfort zone”!

The weight set point though set naturally by the body has nothing to do with your health and wellbeing settings! The wrong set point may be setting you up for disaster.

Though the Weight Set Point Theory sounds very natural and predetermined by our genes, its expression and settings are influenced by our lifestyle and environment! As Dr. Weinsier of the University of Alabama has argued, it is within our capability to influence the weight we carry by modifying the environment we live in by our own efforts. Indeed there are many scientists who argue against the existence of weight set point, in spite of the experimental evidence available.

Why do the short-term solutions lose their battle against weight set point?

A glimpse of the previous article must have purged you of all the wrong notions you had about the short-term solutions. The reason why most of the weight loss methods are considered short-term is because they work temporarily. Once you stop taking the ‘magic pill’ or cease to cleanse your system, the lost pounds come back with a vengeance. Also it is almost impossible to stick to these methods for a long time, since they defy nutrition which is necessary for our body.

But why do these methods fail? One of the simplest mechanisms of our body, which has been ignored by most of the weight-loss propagators, is the weight set point. Researchers have found that the human body may have a genetically determined set-point weight that is controlled by metabolic hormones and fat cell enzymes. And any number of attempts to work against the weight set point may not succeed, resulting in a failure of the weight loss methods. The key strategy to successful long term weight loss is working in a supportive environment with comprehensive proven methods that enable your complex body’s weight set point to reset to a new level.